To me, Will & Matt’s shots are great examples of the ‘Keep It Simple Stupid’ theory which I talked about in last week’s post. They keep it simple in such a way that their images of the wild world out there are rock solid images without major tweaks. What the KISS theory doesn’t imply, is that you will get these solid shots presented to you on a silver plate. Matt & Will perfectly illustrate this with their BeetleCam project. To get up close with the animals and to get creative points of view, they went to lengths in creating the means to do so, as explained here! And that it wasn’t always plain sailing, you can read from their latest post. Innovative and inspiring stuff, earning them a well deserved worldwide coverage. The following images (courtesy of BeetleCam and Burrard-Lucas Photography) will make you understand why:

Stunning shots and points of view that would not be possible handheld, at least not when you plan to survive the session, neither would they be possible with remote sensors and the likes, unless you have a serious portion of luck on your side. There are way more shots on Will & Matt’s BeetleCam Page.

Now you probably ask yourself how I come to use these images? And that brings me to the second part of this blog which relates to the idea of creative commons which I read about in a Photofocus blogpost: Stop the presses, I’m going with creative commons. An article talking about the principle of providing people upfront permission to use some of your images for non commercial purposes. A principle also applied by Burrard-Lucas Photography, allowing me to use these images as I did in this blog post and for which I would like to thank Matt & Will. You can find more about this on their BeetleCam Media Enquiries page. Creative Commons seem to work for them and that being said, I would like to end by wishing them some WPOTY BeetleCam glory!

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Actually, BL terms of use (quite similar to what I’ve been using for a decade) illustrate perfectly that the “Creative Commons” license is not necessary to share one’s photography openly. Nothing worth “stopping the presses” for, anyways Philip Greenspun (photo.net) has used such terms since the very early days of the internet.

http://www.picsfromthewild.com Guy Dekelver

Dear Quang-Tuan, thanks a lot for your contribution! Great to hear that a lot more people have been applying this way of sharing their work (already for a very long time). Being fairly new in sharing my work on the web, issues related to sharing and terms of use are some of the many questions that jump through your mind, … Have a great day, Guy